The Millennium British Open championship at St Andrews in July will set records across the board. The prize fund of Stg£2,750,000 is the most ever offered and is more than double the Stg£1,250,000 available when John Daly won the last Open at the same Fife venue five years ago.
Furthermore the winner will take away Stg£500,000, which is not only Stg£125,000 more than Paul Lawrie collected last year at Carnoustie, it is more than the combined amount won by every previous winner of Opens at St Andrews, all 27 of them.
Winning the Open has always been more about glory than money. Nick Faldo, for instance, won only Stg£85,000 in 1990, Severiano Ballesteros Stg£55,000 in 1984 and Jack Nicklaus, the winner in 1970 and 1978, won respectively Stg£5,250 and Stg£12,500. This year any player who makes the halfway cut will receive Stg£7,000.
The growth in prize money, an increase of some 43 per cent on last year, is partly because the 2000 Open is seen as a special occasion and partly because of prize-money levels in other top golf events. The four tournaments that make up the World Golf Championship series each offer $5 million (Stg£3.2 million) purses and the other three major championships are around the $4.5 million mark.
"We are not joining the general inflationary spiral," said the secretary of the Royal and Ancient, Peter Dawson, "but we need to keep competitive with the other championships."
Big though the Open has been for the past 30 years, it has grown hugely in the past decade. This year record crowds of more than 200,000 are expected, there will be a record 21,000 seats and a record 15,000 car-park spaces.
The whole event will also cost a record Stg£7 million to stage and, although Dawson fought shy of an estimate, it is clear that a record income will be generated, perhaps as much as Stg£10 million. The surplus, as always, will be used to fund golf projects around the world.
The competitors will also find that the Old Course has new teeth. The greenkeeping staff of 60 have spent much of the winter rebuilding all 112 bunkers, placing layer upon layer of turf to create facing walls.
As a result some of the bunkers are now smaller, some deeper; and in one case, in a press competition on Wednesday, one of the more elderly hacks had to sit on the edge of the huge bunker at the short 11th, dangle his legs over the edge and slide down into the sand just to get at his ball. It took him nearly double figures to get the ball out and some unaccustomed physical exertions to heave himself out.
He avoided Hell bunker, at the 14th. Measuring 30 yards long and 30 yards wide, it is the biggest on the course and took five men two months to rebuild. Little wonder that Dawson said, with a wry smile: "We have budgeted to lose two per cent of the field in the bunkers."
The R&A has yet to reach a decision on the use of the controversial Callaway driver, the ERC, which is currently legal under the British body's jurisdiction but has been banned by the United States Golf Association. The USGA says it infringes the rules by not having a sufficiently rigid face, allowing a "trampoline" effect which propels the ball much further than with a conventional club.
The R&A is conducting tests at Birmingham university but no conclusions have been reached. This means Colin Montgomerie, a Callaway-contracted player, could in theory win the Open with an ERC driver but be banned from using it in the US PGA a month later.
"That," admitted Dawson, "would be a pretty damned undesirable situation." The R&A was taking its time, he said, because it wanted to be sure.
He remains opposed to the creation of a special limited-length golf ball, to be played by professionals only, in the cause of protecting the great old courses. "It is very important," he said, "that the game is played with the same equipment at all levels. I think it would be very dangerous to move away from that."
